I am looking at improving the way that Mr. Robot handles combat table coverage, particularly for protection paladins. I would like any feedback that you may have! At the moment, I plan to do the following:

- Provide a "CTC" option/checkbox for paladins (and probably warriors too). This "CTC mode" would turn on a few different behaviors:

1. Treat the total avoidance cap as an "at least" condition, rather than a constraint -- the idea is that "something good" happens when you pass that threshold: you are guaranteed to avoid any large hits.

2. Allow for different food and elixirs when trying to reach the avoidance cap, and indicate to the user which consumables were used in the final optimized result.

3. Don't consider temporary effects when shooting for the avoidance cap, such as a trinket on-use effect. The idea is to be capped for the common case, not just when a trinket proc is active.

4. Possibly make the total avoidance cap editable... apparently it is slightly different for particular fights. This would also give users the option to e.g. generate a custom set that caps out when a trinket proc is active, but otherwise is not capped. This feature is the lowest priority, as I think it is the least useful... but still potentially interesting.

Any comments, feedback, or other thoughts on how this CTC mode should operate? We would love some input from our users!

1-3 make sense, 4 is probably not necessary as it's such a niche issue.

#1 is the most important. A lot of people want to plug their gear into Mr. Robot and have it tell them how to gem/reforge to maximize stamina (or avoidance, depending on stat weights) while maintaining block cap.

Maybe it's a matter of language, but for paladins, CTC cap sounds more like a constraint than an "at least". Mastery is worthless to us after that point and getting more of it makes nothing good happen to us.

As theckhd says, I think well geared tanks will want to either maximise stamina or avoidance (or some weighted sum)subject to the constraint of not falling below 102.4%. I don't know if there is a way to programme it so that mastery above 102.4% has zero weight.

Less well geared tanks who can't hit the cap but who press the CTC option will probably want to push towards it as far as possible, but making some trade-off for stamina.

A CTC option for warriors would be nice, as they care about the cap about as much as we do these day. But for them mastery has a value beyond CTC cap as it reduces critical block, but presumably a lower value than mastery below the cap.

econ21 wrote:Maybe it's a matter of language, but for paladins, CTC cap sounds more like a constraint than an "at least". Mastery is worthless to us after that point and getting more of it makes nothing good happen to us.

As theckhd says, I think well geared tanks will want to either maximise stamina or avoidance (or some weighted sum)subject to the constraint of not falling below 102.4%. I don't know if there is a way to programme it so that mastery above 102.4% has zero weight.

What you're talking about is exactly what was described, a minimum or "at least" value rather than a constraint/cap. Consider for a moment exactly what you're saying: Maximise stamina/avoidance whilst maintaining at least 102.4%.

Alternatively, consider the opposite. If you don't include 102.4% as a minimum value, and instead impose it as a cap, an optimizing program is rarely actually going to meet it. Chances are it'll hit 102.1% or 102.2% and say "good enough", because at that point adding another mastery gem (for example) puts you .2% over cap which is wasted, whereas a stamina gem would give the full benefit. A pretty naive and simplistic example but illustrative, I hope.

To yellow, I'd agree with theck that 1-3 all sound like positive, welcome changes but that an editable CTC cap is unnecessary. It'd rarely abet any use and would probably end up just confusing someone. If you check out the Baleroc thread in AT&C (the only fight I can think of where the CTC cap changes), latest thinking is that capping on CTC may not be possible any way; and even if it were it's not necessarily optimal for the encounter.

I have posted an update with a preliminary version of the new behavior. It is recommended that well-geared paladins use the default stat weights and check the "Prioritize CTC" option found in the lower-left. Lower-level paladins may wish to go to the Presets tab in the lower right and choose the "Low-Level CTC" weights, which give a very high weight to mastery and squeeze out a few more points of total avoidance.

After optimizing, if you click on the Show Stats button up by your score, you may see two extra lines in the stat display: "food" and "flask". These indicate any non-standard food or alchemy buffs that were used for the optimization, e.g. for paladins it will often say "Mastery". If you see nothing, then it is using the default feast/cauldron buffs (dodge food, stamina flask).

If you wish to go with a stamina-heavy setup after the avoidance cap is reached, play with the relative weights for stamina and dodge/parry -- it will probably work best to drop the weight on dodge/parry rather than raising the weight on stamina really high.

Just went to check it out. Currently with the default weights and Prioritize CTC selected it's sending me as high as 104.96%. A little bit of stat weight editing trying to get it to favour Stamina by reducing the weights on Dodge and Parry as you suggested Yellow actually caused it to increase to 105.15%. This is pretty much the same problem I had when you introduced the High CTC weight preset a while back.

What, exactly, does the "Prioritize CTC" button do? It seems like it should simply increase the weight factor of mastery relative to dodge/parry, and perhaps reduce the stamina scale factor. However, it's doing so in an odd way - with the default stat weights, it's suggesting STR enchants on rings. That would indicate that it's bumping the value of dodge/parry somehow, such that 40*0.2977*val_strength is getting large enough to beat out 60*val_stamina. Furthermore, it's bumping me up to around 103% CTC or so, so clearly the ring enchants aren't needed (40 STR should be <0.06% CTC before DR). This doesn't happen with the low-level CTC setting, which accurately puts me at around 102.4%.

We should be able to come up with some reasonable rules of thumb for how the algorithm should behave under each circumstance. For example:

That puts a few constraints on what the algorithm should choose. It should prioritize mastery gems, but with proper choice of values for STA, Dodge, and Parry it can enforce socket bonuses. If we want to match X-stamina socket bonuses, then we'd have a constraint of

20*val_mastery + 20*val_dodge_parry + X*val_stamina > 40*val_mastery

Similarly, those choices should be in a range such that 60*val_stamina > 40*val_strength, so that it doesn't choose the strength ring enchants. That should be a pretty trivial constraint to enforce though, as val_strength is already about half as large as val_stamina before DR with the default weightings.

This has an interesting effect on gemming. If we use the CTC relationship between dodge/parry and mastery, it would dictate that val_dodge_parry should be approximately one third of val_mastery after DR at T12 gear levels. However, look at what that does to our constraint equation:

In other words, if we want to match 15-sta socket bonuses, we need to devalue mastery compared to stamina, which would throw the rest of the system for a loop. This isn't all that surprising - trading ~13 mastery worth of CTC for 15 stamina is less efficient than the going rate of 10:15 that itemization imposes.

If we assume that we want to keep val_mastery=1 and val_stamina=2/3 (which so far has served us pretty well), but want to match 15-stam socket bonuses, then we should instead try:

That's after diminishing returns, which means before DR it will have to be around 1 or higher. In other words, this is the default stat weights.

TLDR: The default stat weights seem to work well when you're dancing around the cap, and the CTC-heavy stat weights seem to work well when you're trying to eke out as much CTC as possible. I'm not sure I understand what the "prioritize CTC" button is supposed to accomplish. Is it trying to enforce the cap?

It looks like a few cases are giving it trouble -- certain profession-specific things like ring enchants and JC gems. I'll take a look at it.

The "Prioritize CTC" option is meant to add getting to at least 102.4% avoidance as a higher priority consideration than anything else. The goal is to maximize your score while still also getting to the cap. The CTC option adds another pass of optimization at the end that tries to get you just over the cap while reducing your score the least.

Could you guys post the region/realm/name of a couple characters that are not behaving correctly? I'll do some work on it today and post another update.

There must be a bug somewhere if it is going significantly over the cap... I'll have to dig into a few examples and correct it. Also, a +40 str enchant to a ring should probably never be suggested except in very rare cases where there are no other options to increase avoidance, and that small bump puts you just over the cap.

In other words, I will consider item modification with very low relative scores (like a strength enchant) as only to be used in rare cases where it would actually put you past the cap when nothing else can, but otherwise not suggest them.

Using the default stat weights works fine, it doesn't cap me but it shouldn't be trying to with those stat weights.Checking "Prioritize CTC" switches some gems around (rightly so, dropping 15 STA bonuses for 20 extra mastery), but also switches the ring enchants to 40 STR. This mode puts me at 102.9% CTC with mastery food and the ring enchants.

Using the "Low-Level CTC" preset makes a number of reasonable changes to get me to 101.89%.Checking "Prioritize CTC" makes some more gem changes to bring me up to 102.47%, but does not switch ring enchants to STR.

I posted an update that should fix a few of the bugs, particularly with professions like JC and enchanting.

Also, "Prioritize CTC" is not selected by default -- that was not intended. This is supposed to be an optional gearing strategy that players can turn on/off as they prefer.

The CTC option should stay much closer to the avoidance cap now as well -- give it a try and let me know if any further tweaks are in order.

Note that sometimes the CTC option will cause parry/dodge to separate a little further than the normal algorithm. This is generally not an issue -- it rarely goes higher than a 2% spread or so, which is a negligible loss due to DR.

Since the update posted this morning things are much better than before but there still seems to be a problem with profession benefits. I'm a BS/JC, with "Prioritize CTC" selected the optimizer only sockets two Chimera's Eyes though (as you can see in the link above). Hardly a big deal, but still not flawless behavior.

So I've been using Mr Robot for a while now, and I don't get its recommendation for my helm. I'm currently using Crown of Wings which has a +30 Dodge socket bonus. Because of this, I've chosen to socket a Fine Ember Topaz, activating the socket bonus. Mr. Robot continually recommends (using CTC preset) that I gem this for straight Mastery, which doesn't seem right. What should I do? Keep the socket bonus or go with straight Mastery?

It's because you're using the CTC presets. Every point of mastery is worth approximately 3 points of dodge or parry rating for CTC purposes. The 20 extra mastery you get from the yellow gem is worth more than the 50 doge+parry rating you get by matching the socket bonus.

Bakey wrote:What should I do? Keep the socket bonus or go with straight Mastery?

It's your call, but I would keep the socket bonus. They are free stats, so I feel bad discarding them. 20 mastery vs 50 dodge/parry is rather close to the 1:3 ratio theckhd mentions for the CTC weights. And if you are running dungeons, Yappo has made a good argument for favoring melee damage reduction, where the ratio is close to 1:1.

Personally, I'd only ignore socket survivability bonuses if doing so would just get me to 102.4%, but that's seldom going to be the case.

The "Low-Level CTC" weights are most useful for suggesting BiS gear sets at lower levels. At the T12 level, those weights aren't really necessary -- it's easy to hit the avoidance cap. At lower levels, you need to make more sacrifices and heavily favor mastery to reach it.

As far as optimizing the modifications on your gear (gems, enchants, reforges), it doesn't matter a whole lot which weights you use if you have the Prioritize CTC option turned on. That option is saying, "get me as much total avoidance as possible -- my score be damned!" The option works very well if you are already close to the cap. If you are way under it... you might consider turning it off until you get some more gear.

Torias -- I'll take a look at your character and post a fix that will ensure 3 JC gems are used. I thought I had that fixed... guess it was more like "almost" fixed.